Our last episode…

Denise: Funny, I wanted Rock ‘m Sock em’s and and EZ Bake oven, too. I got the former from a secretary as a gag gift because my writing partner and I fought so much. It blows. And I bought the latter as a holiday gift for my daughter. Interesting, going on the web site I found out back in 1963 when it came out it cost 19.95, exactly what I paid for it today. Now I know why I never got it. You do the math. Sadly, I never wanted things. I wanted people. We were the only three people in our family on this continent and we weren’t even Christian! So Xmas became a sad anemic ritual. Now I do the whole shabang, tree, big dinner, lots of cheer, and what a pain in the ass. When I was 9 I got a real Singer sewing machine that I didn’t even ask for and it was thrilling. I still use it today. The best toy I ever got was the Mattel Thing Maker with the open hot plate that I’m sure could cause third degree burns and industrial fires. God I loved that thing. I can still smell the Goop you used in it today. David C.: I can only think of one story – and it came way past childhood. My (well-intentioned) mother bought my then-fiancee a hobo-doll that looked insane. It so scared the hell out of her that I had to bury it in a box in the garage. Convinced that it was a cousin of Chuckee, and would therefore chew its way out of the box and murder us in our bed, she insisted that I take it to the dump where it was bulldozed into oblivion Vanessa: Things I wanted but never got: plastic high heel dress up shoes, Strawberry shortcake doll. Things I got that ended up sucking: Barbie dolls. Wanted them so bad. Then I cut their hair and realized that changing their outfits was really, really boring. Other thing that ended up sucking: Shrinky-Dinks. Plastic things you colored on that shrink in the oven. Whoopdy-doo! Kristy: I wanted a Barbie Head Doll forever. Then I got her and found out that she had the same balding problem after a month as my Uncle Bill for whom my Aunt Julie took responsibility for pulling all of his hair out because "he wouldn’t do everything she wanted." So back to the Barbie head doll. The brush was too small and the fake rollers didn’t make her hair do anything but stick inside them. I even remember the makeup it came with was like one giant hard cake of chalk, like writing chalk. What a disappointment she was. Barbie Beauty Queen beheaded onto a plastic plate. Sick really. Oh and now that I think about it, you had to place her between your legs to get any leverage on that long silky plasticide-like hair. Much like an oral sex pose. It was Barbie Head Doll…but c’mon…. Carey: Since I was an only child, I pretty much got everything I asked for when I was a little girl. Except, I always wanted a pony. Living in Palm Springs, all of my friends had one so I thought why couldn’t I. For every year I asked, my parents thought that horse-related gifts would suffice: a collection of Black Beauty novels, plastic collectible horse figures, cowboy boots, etc. While all those things were cool, I still wanted the horse. My sucky Christmas gifts didn’t come until I was an adult, actually, last year to be exact. My husband of five years (now ex) gave me boat loads of Bath & Body Works lotion–the really strong smelly stuff. While most women love that stuff, my asthma kicks in just being within two feet of it. (I think he was trying to inadvertently kill me for leaving him.) Also, a good friend of mine gave me one of those martini shakers that have recipes for all bar drinks engraved on it. I am not a heavy drink and put myself through college being a bartender and cocktail waitress. I guess, the friend wasn’t as close as I thought. Jerrilyn: This is the very stuff that has probably inspired me to avoid therapy lo these many years, but if you insist: Things I wanted from Santa: Barbie with the cool poofy silk skirt, EZ Bake oven and every packet and miniature box of cake mix they made, and a real microscope. Things I got in my stocking each and every year: One apple. One orange. One banana. And a small package of sequins. (Additional note of pathos: Since we didn’t have a fireplace in our mid-century (hah!) split-level house in the suburbs of Chicago, my brother and I hung our brown stockings (borrowed for one night only from my dad’s sock drawer) from a piano bench in the living room–the room with the clear-plastic slipcovers over the pastel blue couch. The above was what my sweet Jewish mother imagined was enough for her kids to get from that Santa Claus. Barbara: I wanted cowboy boots. I was probably 8 or 9. For some reason, I thought my parents weren’t going to get them for me and I was really upset. I searched the house hi and low, couldn’t find my hidden gift. (They knew better than to leave it under the tree before Christmas morning.) By the time Christmas day arrived, I had worked myself into a real snit. When I opened the box to see my authentic, leather, pointy toe boots, I made one attempt to pull them on and then threw them across the room declaring in a hysterical pout, "They don’t even fit. I found out later that those boots are stiff and you really have to work them on, especially when they’re brand new. Linda V.: I really wanted a chemistry set, and in a moment of temporary insanity when my mother gave the gift-getting over to my father, I actually scored one. Of course, I didn’t have a lick of talent for anything scientific, and the only thing I ever ended up doing with my chemistry set was burning sulfur. The house would smell like rotten eggs for days on end. Mary: I don’t really remember any gifts that sucked, but I will say that the gifts that hold up best, long-term, seem to be live animals. Like the hamster I got one year – it was the best gift I can remember. I would have liked a pony, but I understood it was never going to happen. Jennifer: Well, I have thought long and hard about this one (I was an only child for the major portion of my childhood) and the only thing I can think of is a baby blue jersey wrap skirt from K-mart that said "Disco" on it. Thank god my mom said no. I told her she’s not the one wearing it, and she replied, "Yes, but I’m the one who has to walk around with you."

Happy Holidays one and all…Tod

A continuation from below…

Stacy: Okay, I totally wanted this doll, and I can’t think of what she was called, but basically you would make this food for her (packets were included I think, probably some scary red powder that had to be mixed with water or something) and feed her, and then she would develop diaper rash. The television commercial showed the red-dot rash emerging from pin holes in her bottom! I thought this was the coolest doll ever! But then my mom heard from other moms that much of the food stuff gets stuck inside the doll and the doll starts stinking up a storm in no time. My mom refused to have two (if I got one my little sister would want one too!) smelly dolls in the house, so she instructed Grandma to get Baby-Crawl-Away for us instead. Here comes the story of the doll that blew. Baby Crawl Away was only coordinated enough to crawl on the first two seconds of her battery. (You had to take her plastic ass apart constantly to put new batteries in.) After that she was a mess of arms and legs and fell flat on her face every time. Sometimes my sister and I would race our Baby Crawl Aways and bet on which one would bite it first. And to make a doll that (so-called) crawled, she was all hard plastic with mechanical joints and stuff–the least cuddly doll ever. So when she fell on her face, it didn’t really occur to anyone to pick her up and hold her, so everyone just left her there in her battery-induced seizure. Sad. And no match for diaper rash on command…. Chad: The year was 1984 (I think) I asked for the 8-bit Nintendo game Commando from Santa – I also told my mom that she could buy it at Toys R Us. She proceeded to tell me that Santa doesn’t buy his toys from Toys R Us. I then explained to her that I knew she and my dad were "Santa," and that there was no real fucking Santa.So Christmas rolled around and under the tree was a box for me from "Santa" that was roughly the shape of a nintendo game. I opened it up and found a god-damned piece of black coal. My mom told me that kids who don’t beleive in Santa get coal. That was my christmas present for the year. And yeah… it sucked. Jennie: Since I was lucky enough not to need to ask for my two front teeth, I got to concentrate on other stuff. I totally bought the advertisements that Maniac was a cool game, and it sucked. That was my school of hard knocks education on advertising. One year my brother and I asked for a Coleco Vision game system, and it rocked. The graphics were way better than the Atari systems my friends had, and we spent hours playing Donkey Kong, Ladybug, and Xaxon David DB: When I was in high school I wanted a subscription to Playboy and my mom wouldn’t get it for me. When I was in grammar school, the kids across the street from me got these really cool new transistor portable radios, leather covered, they could hold in their palms up to their ears. I asked my dad for a portable radio and he got me a big pink one with tubes. Try taking that to school in your bookbag, or pulling out a pink radio in front of the local Pacoima gangs. Ned: The six foot long GI JOE aircraft carrier…$100 from Kay-Bee Toys with multiple levels for all your GI Joe action…pretty sure "Shipwreck" was the action figure that came with it. That or Optimus Prime from the Transformers. I can remember countless annoying sweaters or other boring clothing items instead. Then there were the pillow cases we got from our babysitter, Mrs.Cooper. Way boring!Of course, probably the worst Christmas I had, which I don’t even remember,came when I was all of 20 months old and was pounding on our piano in the living room. The lid came down and lopped off the tip of my left index finger. We hurried to the emergency room and the doctor decided to sew it back on. Country wisdom being we can always take it back off again if it wasn’t going to set. Dr. Rodawig knew what he was doing and I have the tip to my index finger to this day…albeit a little misshapen. Clair: I never got the EZ Bake oven and I always asked for it. I also never got the Play-Doh Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop. Instead, my twin sister and I got the Play-Doh Monster Mold set, which was totally lame. It had a pump — sort of — through which you squeezed Play-Doh into these monster molds. Then you pried the two halves of the mold apart, and you were supposed to get cool-looking monster figurines. Instead, you got big lumps of Play-Doh with lines in them that might have looked like monsters if you were astigmatic. Plus, when we tried to create multi-colored figurines, as shown on the box, we just wound up squishing together all our different colors of Play-Doh so it could never be used for anything else again. Then again, we were four, so maybe it would have worked better if we’d had better motor skills. But I’m sure we would not have had these problems with the Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop.

I’ve been thinking about censorship and book banning a lot lately. There have been several instances in the last few months that have made me wonder aloud — both in my column and here on Lee’s blog, both in the comments and during a previous guest-hosting stint a few weeks back — about the reasons behind this upswing. In a comment regarding last week’s note about the English teacher in Wisconsin being castigated for teaching mystery fiction, I said that I thought some of it had a correlation to the recent election and its outcome and at least one regular reader of this blog disagreed, which means others probably did as well. In some cases, there is an obvious bias involved in the request that books be banned or censored — like the whacko the fine citizens of Alabama have representing them who thinks books featuring gay characters and/or themes should be removed from public and university libraries — and other times it appears to be an issue of parents fearing that their children will be ruined if exposed to thoughts and ideas that run contrary to what they are being taught at home.  Lately, this has meant that things involving homosexuals, violence, sex, suicide and drug use are verboten.

So if books containing these things are not appropriate for a 15, 16, 17 or 18 year old to read, what is? What is safe for a teenager? Sweet Valley High? What is worse — a book the distorts reality — like Sweet Valley High or books of its ilk — or books that deal with reality? As a child, my mother always encouraged me (and Lee and our sisters Linda and Karen) to read whatever we wanted and I did. I’d read all the Spenser novels in print by the time I was 13. I read every Stephen King novel in print by the same time. I also read things like Seth Speaks  and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and whatever odd novel was left sitting around the house (like, uh, Jonathan Livingston Seagull for instance) and I’d venture to say that I turned out okay. I don’t have children, but I know many of you do. So tell me: What is appropriate? And what is an inappropriate book for a teenager to read? (If you want some idea about what PABBIS [Parents Against Bad Books In Schools] believes the answer is to the latter, check this out…oh no, kids want to read 100 Questions and Answers About AIDS!)

— Tod

As a child, I was often admonished by a certain older brother that I was not to:

1. Go in his room when he wasn’t home.

2. Touch his stuff (which meant, basically, the stacks of TV Guides, over played Knack albums and his novel-in-progress…which was about an underwater sperm lab if memory serves me correct).

3.  Mess up the Stratego board (Lee played A LOT of Stratego back in the day).

Cut to 25 years later, and here I am touching everything. It feels excellent. So, until Lee gets back, I rule this blog! I will play "My Sharona" all night! I will knock over his stacks of TV Guides and I will re-write his novel!

In the meantime, should you wish to contact me, send all hate mail, queries, odd questions , naked pictures of Cylons and/or naked pictures of me to TodGoldberg@TodGoldberg.com